‘A smile is a curve that sets everything straight’. During the most dispirited times of life when one remembers this popular anecdote by Phyllis Diller, an American comedian, one might see it as a philosophical statement to the idea of happiness and healing. But, delving deeper, such a statement is no less invested in the social and global economic meanings that mobilize our localized everyday and beyond. Today, smile and happiness are not merely one’s inner retreats or bliss influenced by affective habitus, it is also about one’s social and self-presentation across networked digital platforms. Be it taking a selfie with a wide smile, posting a big ‘smilie’ over WhatsApp or just smiling against exotic locations, the relational and structural effects of a smile reflect complex intersections between digital practices, selfhood and neo-liberal entitlements.
Consumption and Emotions: What we choose?
Today, happiness is often materialized through the reel-making digital culture. Often, various vlogs infuse the ideology of happiness as invested in material consumption which is mediated through brand maximizations. The brand(isation) of multiple things such as clothing, fooding, gadgets, etc., often triggers an essence of virtual belonging(ness) and adaptation to the dramatic changes across urbanity and aspirational space-making. Such social and material practices not only reinforce quasi-norms of productive and ‘active’ citizens but also legitimize the structure of the contemporary state-corporate nexus. In the micro-contexts of life, this too reveals a complex form of relationship between the reproduction of bodies as a relational asset and the reconfiguring of bodies and emotions as a generative effect of neo-liberal visuality. Such visuality of brands and the associated expression of happiness located within spaces like shopping malls, costly movie halls (PVRs), etc., asserts what can be referred to as ‘conspicuous consumption’ or the shifting meanings of class, status and wealth. Veblen (2017) in his critical work titled ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class’ depicts consumption in the contemporary era as defined more by social emulation and categorization of taste rather than mere generational wealth. Relatively, making visible branded items in metropolises today indicates consumption as a mechanism of urban and spatial culturation of emotional identities.
However, the question that arises today is: How do emotional behaviours such as happiness and joy get materialized through the multiple contours of neo-liberal production? While different people might experience happiness in different ways, the hegemonic processes of living and being restructures happiness as an ethic of neo-liberal subjectivity. From an innate reflective element, happiness is rapidly turning into a site of marketizing aesthetics that reproduces the upper/upper-middle class lifestyles. This, I argue, can be defined as ‘aesthetic capitalism’ that normalizes, mobilizes and legitimizes the expression of emotions (as acts or unintended) through the effective utilization of digital media and its interactive processes in everyday lives. In a way, the emotions of buying things also popularise the brands against which consumers click their pictures. On one hand, while the consumers participate in the larger transnational spaces as the agents of modern nationalism, on the other, their patterns of emotive consumption reflect what Harvey (2001, p. 24) counsels as a ‘spatial fix’, i.e., the flows of capitalism influencing geographical restructuring.
When Emotions turn into Digital Aesthetics
Emotions are not mere affective processes of stimulating a reactional behaviour but expand a complex relationship between agency, digital communication and liminality. In the course of observing and conversing with many people, I realised how emotions performed by them today largely shifted from their bio-cultural environment to networked digital aesthetics – spreading across different subjects and performative relations of power and meanings in digital media.
The above argument can be explored more with a few field observations and conversations made in 2023 and 2024. A young medical student, Rati (23 years) living in Guwahati, Assam, evolved her social personality and ability to communicate with others which she attributes to her ‘posts’ over social media, specifically on WhatsApp and Instagram. As she developed it into a regular habit to keep herself active and relevant, she too marked it as a pivotal quotient to live and feel happy. An underside of such mobility also signifies a statement of symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1986) that facilitates representation and recognition, further positioning her social agency. That social agency, however, lies in a dichotomous relationship of desiring material autonomy vis-a-vis pursuing belonging(ness) to a community. Her digital community or community involved in status surveillance such as her peers, cousins, intern cohorts, etc., influence her participation in social media posts with glamourous dresses which she praised as her ability to be fashionable while locating herself in an educational institution. The reels she makes also beget her various calls for product advertisements that redefine a social economy of digitalism while leading to a complex reification of human emotions.
The projection of emotions through digital spaces leads to the ‘making of’ emotions (reels, posts and consumption) as a form of investment of labour and citizenship rather than experiencing it in pure embodied moments. A more dilemmic account of the digitalization of emotions then erupts in the words of an elderly woman Shovana (64 years) who refers to emotions as a transitioning spectre of connectedness in the contemporary world. She once thoughtfully remarked that her ageing process is filled with the celebration of her being(ness) in physical spaces but a lot more in the digital. This she utters as the ‘trend’. For instance, inviting guests to her home is followed by a picture of the multiple continental dishes she cooks with a lot of selfies and poses. In a conversation, she expressed, that the food often gets cold as the clicks continue, and she posts and reposts it for her neighbours to see. As her happy posts receive more ‘likes’ across social media, it shapes a resilient action for her to contest the gendered norms of subservient femininity. This simultaneously leads her to reflect on the changing social, subjective and familial emotionality as she recollects the simplicity by which she and her family members consumed food while sitting on the floors and being served by her mothers and aunts; even if it invoked gender hierarchies and subordination in their lived spaces.
In the present times, when the social character of lives and emotions are determined by a quest for public representation and digital centrality, the interior sensations of people are significantly determined by virtual dimensions of existence. This occurs across the modalities of physical stimuli and digital expansion, shared past and present as well as bodies and culture. So, on the one hand, while emotional outlets receive acknowledgement through the potentials of digital media, on the other, it induces greater complexity across the blurriness of private/intimate lives. This state of projecting happiness through intense consumption of things and its routine demonstration in digital media reminds me of Neff and Nagy’s (2019, p.102) words, ‘Human-technology interaction is characterized both by users’ perceptions and emotions and by the emotions evoked by the design and aesthetic features of devices or digital products’.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1986). The Forms of Capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (pp. 241 – 291). Westport, U.S.: Greenwood Press.
Harvey, D. (2001). Globalization and the ‘spatial fix’. Geographische Revue, 2, 23-30.
Neff, G. and Nagy, P. (2019). Agency in the Digital Age: Using Symbiotic Agency to Explain Human-Technology Interaction. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A Networked Self and Human Augmentics, Artificial Intelligence, Sentience (pp. 97 – 107). Routledge.
Veblen, T. (2017). The Theory of the Leisure Class. Routledge.
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Ahana Choudhury is a Doctoral Scholar at the Department of Sociology, Tezpur University, India.